Suicide Prevention

In "What Drives So Many to Take Their Lives?" (Commentary, Aug. 9) Robert Gerner suggests that the White House attorney, Vincent W. Foster Jr., committed suicide because he was suffering from a clinical depression. This may well be true, although it is also true that many people (especially adolescents) who attempt or commit suicide are not clinically depressed. Although Gerner provides considerable valuable information about depression, there is some vital information that was overlooked.

OLATHE, Kan. - A self-styled white supremacist from Missouri appeared by video in a packed courtroom on Tuesday and was charged with capital murder in the killings of three people outside two Jewish facilities. Frazier Glenn Cross Jr., 73, was charged with one count of capital murder and one count of premeditated first-degree murder in connection with the Sunday shooting at a Jewish Community Center and nearby Jewish retirement home. If Cross is convicted of capital murder, under Kansas law, he could face the death penalty.

Hoping to dissuade despondent people from leaping to their deaths from the Colorado Street Bridge, Pasadena officials plan to install signs that encourage those considering suicide to instead call for help. City workers will install two 12-by-18-inch metal signs at each end of the century-old bridge sometime over the next two months, Assistant City Manager Steve Mermell said. The signs will include the number of a suicide prevention hotline. “If we can save even one life with one reasonable step we can take, we should,” said Pasadena City Councilman Steve Madison, one for four elected city leaders to endorse the signs during a public meeting last week.

A whopping 41% of people who are transgender or gender-nonconforming have attempted suicide sometime in their lives, nearly nine times the national average, according to a sweeping survey released three years ago. In a new study released Tuesday, researchers dug deeper into that number, analyzing the results of the National Transgender Discrimination Survey to examine what puts transgender people at such "exceptionally high" risk. Researchers from the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law found that the risk of attempting suicide was especially severe for transgender or gender nonconforming people who had suffered discrimination or violence, such as being physically or sexually assaulted at work or school.

September 20, 2011 | By Shari Roan, Los Angeles Times / For the Booster Shots blog

Suicide has emerged as a prominent public health issue in recent years because of the stubbornly high rate of such deaths in the United States. But the announcement Tuesday of the MacArthur Fellowships will provide a boost in research aimed at preventing people from taking their own lives. MacArthur fellow Matthew Nock, 38, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, said the award will also help advance research that is beginning to dispel some myths about suicide. Suicide is the 10th-leading cause of death in the United States, accounting for about 100 deaths per day. The most recent data, for 2008, show rates are inching upward despite the fact that more people with mental illnesses are treated today, Nock said.

The Suicide Prevention/Intervention project of the West Orange County HOTLINE organization is seeking volunteers to work in its community-education program. Help is needed in distributing literature, giving talks and writing publicity releases. Volunteers are especially needed to staff the crisis-intervention line. Volunteer telephone counselors, who may be any age from 17 to 70, will be trained in public speaking, crisis intervention and skills regarding conversation, listening and responding.

South Korean officials have announced that they are taking increased steps to combat a worsening public ill: suicide. In this high-pressure East Asian nation, residents are taking their lives at a rate that is three times higher than two decades ago. The rise has given South Korea the highest suicide rate among the 34 member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The nation's rate of self-inflicted deaths is sizably higher than those of other nations in the organization, according to 2009 statistics, the most recent available.

Forty-one Marines marched on command to the front of the hall and stared at hundreds of their comrades assembled Friday for a presentation ordered by top generals to try to stem a rising rate of suicide. The Marines represented the number who took their own lives last year, more than were killed in Iraq (34) or in Afghanistan (27). Losing a Marine to suicide, Col. Lori Reynolds told the group, is like abandoning a Marine in combat.

Edwin S. Shneidman, a pioneer in the field of suicide prevention and a prolific thinker and writer who believed that life is enriched by contemplation of death and dying, has died. He was 91. He died Friday afternoon at his home in West Los Angeles, according to his son, Robert. He had been in poor health for the last few months. Shneidman, one of the founders of the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Center, believed that two simple questions -- "Where do you hurt?" and "How may I help you?"

Dr. Robert E. Litman, a psychiatrist who co-founded the nation's first comprehensive suicide prevention center more than 50 years ago in Los Angeles and carried out groundbreaking work there, has died. He was 88. Litman died Feb. 14 of acute leukemia at a daughter's Manhattan Beach home, said his wife, Connie. "He was something of a genius," said Sam Heilig, a social worker who helped establish the center. "He was a prominent psychoanalyst . . . and a very creative thinker. He did strong, imaginative, adventurous work."

Twitter is great for spoiling TV shows and criticizing Miley Cyrus' latest performance, but researchers at Brigham Young University say the social network may also be an effective way of identifying users at risk of suicide. A study that will be released Friday says researchers at BYU studied Twitter for three months, looking for tweets that directly discussed suicide as well as keywords and phrases related to risk factors and warning signs for suicide. They found nearly 38,000 "troubling tweets" from more than 28,000 users.

Hoping to dissuade despondent people from leaping to their deaths from the Colorado Street Bridge, Pasadena officials plan to install signs that encourage those considering suicide to instead call for help. City workers will install two 12-by-18-inch metal signs at each end of the century-old bridge sometime over the next two months, Assistant City Manager Steve Mermell said. The signs will include the number of a suicide prevention hotline. “If we can save even one life with one reasonable step we can take, we should,” said Pasadena City Councilman Steve Madison, one for four elected city leaders to endorse the signs during a public meeting last week.

This post has been updated. See the note below for details. The lead mental health expert appointed to recommend ways for California to lower its prison suicide rate and assess the state's progress says conditions are so bad, he is giving up. In a report filed Wednesday to update the federal court on California's climbing rate of prison suicides, Dr. Raymond Patterson blasted the state for failing to follow many of the recommendations he...

SACRAMENTO - Gov. Jerry Brown has pointed to reams of documents to make the case in court and on the stump that California's prison crisis is over, and inmates are receiving good care. But there is at least one document the administration wanted to hide. New court filings reveal that the state suppressed a report from its own consultant warning that California's prison suicide-watch practices encouraged inmate deaths. Lindsay Hayes, a national expert on suicide prevention in prisons, told corrections officials in 2011 that the state's system of holding suicidal inmates for days in dim, dirty, airless cells with unsanitized mattresses on the floor was compounding the risk that they would take their own lives.

SACRAMENTO - A court-appointed monitor said Friday that Gov. Jerry Brown's quest to end judicial oversight in state prisons is "not only premature, but a needless distraction" from improving care for mentally ill inmates. Special Master Matthew Lopes cited dozens of suicides last year, long isolation instead of treatment and lapses in care as reasons federal oversight should continue. Lopes' assessment, in a report filed Friday with the U.S. District Court, came after he visited two-thirds of California's prisons.

Lena Dunham of "Girls" TV show fame will appear in the next issue of V magazine, due out Jan. 10. She was shot by photographer Terry Richardson. [The Cut] Target's holiday collaboration with Neiman Marcus seemed to leave shoppers cold, and Time magazine reports that critics blame prices that were too high for budget-minded Target customers -- consider a Marc Jacobs scarf that started at $69 (it's now slashed to $20) and a Prabul Gurung cape ($79.99, now $23.99) -- along with merchandise that was deemed to be unexciting.

A drive to raise funds to set up a suicide prevention hot line in Seal Beach will continue Sunday with a luncheon and celebrity bowling event. The Seal Beach Rotary Club has raised about $9,000 from previous fund-raisers, president Don Lanier said. He said Sunday's activities are expected to raise the additional $5,000 to $6,000 needed to begin the program.

President Bush on Thursday signed into law a bill authorizing $82 million in grants aimed at preventing suicide among young people. The Garrett Lee Smith Memorial Act is named for the son of Oregon Republican Sen. Gordon Smith, who championed the legislation as a tribute to his 21-year-old son, who committed suicide last year. The senator, his wife, Sharon, daughter Brittany and son Morgan attended the signing ceremony at the White House.

California has launched a mass media campaign to raise awareness about suicide prevention, officials announced Wednesday. The bilingual campaign , called Know the Signs , will include television, print, online and radio ads on how to recognize warning signs and how to help those at risk. The media outreach is part of a broader, $30-million suicide prevention effort in California that began last year and will continue through June 2014. Friends and relatives play an important role in preventing suicide by noticing changes and providing reassurance that help is available, according to mental health officials.

Think bullying doesn't hurt? A new study suggests otherwise, finding that a youth aged 10 to 17 who reports that he or she has been victimized by peers in the past year is nearly 2 1/2 times likelier to have suicidal thoughts than an adolescent who reports no recent victimization. If you add the experience of sexual assault or parental maltreatment to peer victimization, a child's likelihood of pondering suicide is 3.4 times and 4.4 times as high, respectively, as that of a child with no such recent history.